The hills are alive with glowing Buddhas

It was a terrible loss when the giant 1,600-year-old Buddha statues in the Bamiyan Valley of Afghanistan were dynamited by the Taliban in 2001. Can they be brought back? The NYT describes a technological fix:

The artist Hiro Yamagata (born near Kyoto in 1948) hopes to use laser holograms to create more than 160 faceless statues across the Bamiyan cliffs, all powered by solar energy and windmills. If the project is approved, completion is scheduled for 2009, and the artist has said that many of the windmills could also provide power to nearby villages.

When I think of those vast, serene Buddha statues carved into the cliffs of Bamiyan, this is not what first comes to mind. A curious project. And the more you browse the artist's website, the curiouser it seems. The sponsor is Beverly Hills Mercedes Benz. Go figure.

Not a lot of luck in line or online

Wisconsin Film Festival advance ticket sales began today. Just got program. Need more time to make all our selections, but wanted to buy tickets for the one event we know we don't want to miss — and which is likely to sell out, having a big draw in a tiny venue, the Cinematheque. Roger Ebert will be introducing a restored print of the 1944 Gene Tierney mystery, Laura. Online ordering doesn't seem to be up yet, so I headed for the Memorial Union to nail down the tickets. The line started at the second floor Film Festival box office, snaked all the way through through the Union, down past the theater, threatening to spill out to the frozen lake. Turned out the computers were down and the box office hadn't even opened. I gave up and left, figuring I'd order online when the system came back up. Eventually, later in the afternoon, it did. Found what we wanted. Sold out. Just my luck. Still want to see Ebert. We'll probably go early the night of the show and wait in line for a couple of the last-minute tickets. Standing in line is half the fun, anyhow.

Front man

Via Josh Marshall -- funny.

Slice of life

Real life was an injured red-tailed hawk, perched on its handler’s arm, unexpectedly encountered in the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden several years ago. An amazing moment, which I tried to capture with my digital point-and-shoot, failing completely. Like most photos shot on the run, it was awkwardly composed and completely lacking the excitement I was trying to catch.

This slice of life restores some of the impact.

It’s a mere sliver, cropped out of a larger frame, using less than fifth of my 2 megapixels. When making prints, you can’t throw away that many pixels without getting a fuzzy picture. Not so when blogging. With the inherently limited resolution of computer displays, you’ve got pixels to burn.

If nothing else, it’s a good excuse to look over your old photos from a new perspective. Who knows what slice of life you’ll find there, ready to be excavated and repurposed?

Turning down the global thermostat

Is there any way to suddenly reverse global warming? Try introducing large numbers of flea-infested rats. It seems to work.

Beachcombing

The snowbirds are down there, and we're not. Maybe next year.

Rough beast slouching

For some reason, hawks seem to love to quote Yeats out of context in order to accuse Iraq war critics of being "full of passionate intensity," as if that settles everything. Maybe it's the falconry thing. Here's Roger Cohen, The New York Times' resident "Globalist," about a month ago:

Anyone who is certain about the outcome in Iraq is wrong. The country is not the Bush administration: loving or hating what America is doing there cannot be a blind reflection of partisan politics. "The worst are full of passionate intensity," wrote Yeats. He might have had Iraq in mind.

On those miles of concrete blast blocks, election posters are peeling. Is insecurity prevailing, as the walls suggest, or freedom, as embodied in those posters? It's the latter, by a small margin. Things are getting better in Iraq.

As Iraq slides deeper into chaos, the more appropriate quote would seem to come from the last two lines of the same poem.

What a tragic waste

I haven't been able to get this picture out of my mind since seeing it over the weekend in Common Dreams. As the caption explains, it's a screenshot of the last broadcast by a brave Iraqi woman journalist who was brutally murdered shortly after transmitting what turned out to be her final story:

A TV grab taken off the Dubai-based Al-Arabiya satellite news channel shows its reporter in Baghdad, Iraqi journalist Atwar Bahjat al-Samerai who was assassinated in Samarra on 22 February, transmitting her last report from an open field on the fringes of the central Iraqi city after sunset yesterday. Three Iraqi journalists working for al-Arabiya were kidnapped and killed on the outskirts of Samarra, north of Baghdad, police said. (AFP/Al-Arabiya)

"Half Sunni and half Shi’ite, Atwar’s dedication to impartial reporting made her enemies on both sides of Iraq’s sectarian divide: she could never satisfy one without infuriating the other," writes her friend and fellow Arab woman journalist, Hala Jaber. That's what happens when a country slides toward civil war -- the middle ground disappears. The results are brutal:

The bleak facts were that Atwar had driven to her native Samarra after the destruction of its Shi’ite shrine but found her route blocked by security checkpoints. Wearing a green coat and matching headscarf, she made two live broadcasts from just outside the city.

Her third broadcast, just after 6pm, was her last and her make-up failed to conceal her strain. Not only was she tired; she was telling colleagues she was worried that she could not get into the city, night was falling and she was a long way from home.

A small, hostile crowd gathered. Then two gunmen arrived in a pick-up truck. She appealed to the crowd for help but the gunmen dispersed them by firing into the air.

Soon afterwards more shots were heard. Atwar’s body and those of her camerman and sound man were found next to their van. The green coat was ripped by two bullets in the back. She also took two to the head. She was 30 years old.

What can you say? Just one more death out of thousands -- and it was probably not even noticed by the people who thought this would be a cakewalk.

Protecting the readers of The New Yorker from narrative vagueness and purposeful incompletion

None of the stories in Deborah Eisenberg’s new story collection, Twilight of the Superheroes, were published in The New Yorker, where Eisenberg’s fiction first started appearing back when the father of her long-time companion, Wallace Shawn, was the editor. The current fiction editor explains why The New Yorker passed on the new stories.

"There was a narrative vagueness and the sense of a purposeful incompletion in a lot of the stories," said Deborah Treisman, The New Yorker's fiction editor. "In the context of a magazine, the reader would be left with so many questions," Ms. Treisman said. "But when you read the collection as a whole, you see the design."

Good to know that The New Yorker would never trouble a reader’s mind with questions.

On the way to the office

Beautiful drive this morning. The black horse was out again.

On the road to oligarchy

Paul Krugman’s (Times Select firewall apology) column in the Times this morning -- he attacks the complacent assumption that, OK, much of America may be lagging or falling behind, but hey, the top 20 percent, those who work hard, go to college and get professional degrees, are doing well. Not so, at least not most of them

Highly educated workers have done better than those with less education, but a college degree has hardly been a ticket to big income gains. The 2006 Economic Report of the President tells us that the real earnings of college graduates actually fell more than 5 percent between 2000 and 2004. Over the longer stretch from 1975 to 2004 the average earnings of college graduates rose, but by less than 1 percent per year.
…
But income at the 99th percentile rose 87 percent; income at the 99.9th percentile rose 181 percent; and income at the 99.99th percentile rose 497 percent. No, that's not a misprint.

We’re becoming increasingly oligarchic, he says. And, as he notes, “highly unequal societies also tend to be highly corrupt.” Sound familiar?

Things we can throw away for another four years

The flame has gone out, the crowds have gone home. Just when you finally figure out what a twizzle is, it's time to clean out the attic of your mind, pack up all those newly acquired factoids and set them out at the curb. In four years you'll get new ones.

Here it's summer all the time

They say that a lack of daylight is what brings on winter depression, but whenever I come out of the Bolz Conservatory here in Madison, I wonder if the real problem isn't just that all the green is gone. Humans evolved in the African savannah, not the Arctic. Why wouldn't we feel weird surrounded by winter white? The light just feels wrong, without growing things to catch and scatter the sun's rays and warm up the pale, cold blue. A touch of gold helps, too.

What I dreamed about George Bush

I get angry about the media pundits' shameless pandering to George Bush, but it's not as if I don't understand the impulse. I've been there -- in my dreams.

Not long ago I dreamed that I was a writer, outspoken in opposition to the war. Sort of a journalist, sort of an essayist. I'm visiting George Bush at the ranch. He's putting on the kind of charm offensive he's known for among journalists, clowning around, making up nicknames for me. All smiles. "Pedro," he's calling me now.

Suddenly his mood changes, becomes steely. "You don't like my war, do you?"

He's got my number. I stumble around, looking for a tactful reply -- this is the President, after all. Before I find the words I'm looking for, he adds, ominously, "I could have you taken out."

Is he serious, or joking? I don't know, although the look he gives me suggests he's not joking. It seems pretty clear that he's using "taken out" as a euphemism for "killed." I'm filled with fear. One call to the death squads and that's it.

Then he's all smiles and jokes again. But I backtrack like crazy. I tell him I'm not really a journalist, my opinion means nothing. Besides, I don't really care about politics. All I really want to do is write fiction. Harmless stuff. He moves on, without responding. I don't know what he thinks, or intends.

Still weak with fear, I get a second chance to try and redeem myself (in their eyes) when Laura takes me on a smiley tour of the ranch, showing all the improvements they've made. As I accompany her, I enthuse about the work they've done and try to reassure her I'm a shallow, apolitical person, just a harmless writer of fiction that nobody reads. She nods, smiles her First Lady Smile, and I don't know what the hell she's thinking.

All the while, I'm feeling terribly guilty about betraying my personal convictions -- the Galileo of Crawford, Texas.